Monday, November 3, 2008

I have over the years taken a special interest / dislike for one of the alleged “deans”of the blogosphere as we know it. That alleged “dean” being one Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a.k.a. “Instapundit”. Many moons ago, I commented at another blog, Tony Pierce's Busblog—one of the first I ever read regularly, about ol' Insty, and I was to say the least...brutal. I hadn't been boppin' about the “verse” for very long, but it didn't take much time for me to see Reynolds for the mendacious, disingenuous and often cowardly hack he was (is).

One of the things that struck me about him was that calculated aloofness he'd trot out when there was a policy or talking point he wanted to pimp like his name was “Silky” while maintaining a bogus patina of “But hey, I'm not really pimping this.” He trots this angle out whenever a truly heinous blogospheric fellow traveler says something so off-the-wall racist / xenophobic / hopelessly retrograde / war-mongering that it cannot be defended by sane, decent-hearted folk.

So, he simply links with a quote-grab and follows it with a “Heh.” or “Indeed”, or the truly madddening “This is interesting / troubling / a cause for concern”, and leave the just-squeezed-out turd there a' steaming on the page.

Another favorite tack of his (outside of his infamous tendency to ignore wingnut damaging stories and scandals for days and weeks, only to say “I don't know enough about this to comment, but it seems like nothing.”, and his even more craven tendency to throw up odd photo pictorials when something truly ghastly bites his conservative pals on their pasty asses—usually a weird “I'm walking around the campus with this camera so I don't have to be at my desk fielding calls and seeing online coverage of the horror I know is going on.”) is to run a particular line of reasoning into the ground when it supports his GOP masters—often with his own brand of sour, bitchy snark—and then when that same point rears its head when it cuts the other way and can help a progressive, utterly forget how he thought it was okay when his side did it, and then pillory liberals for it like they fucking killed somebody.

The rope-belted perfesser's latest play on this was his eye-bulgingly insipid OpEd piece in the New York Times this past Monday where he championed the dialing back of the vice-president's powers now that his pal Dick Cheney is about to slither off into the mists like one of those awful hell-wraiths from the movie “Ghost”:

The presidential campaign has taken a detour into a dispute over the constitutional status of the vice presidency. It all started when Sarah Palin asserted in her debate with Joe Biden that the vice president should play an important role in the legislative branch.

Ms. Palin has been roundly mocked for her claim. But she was probably right.... Aside from the job of replacing a president who dies or is unable to serve, the only vice presidential duties that are spelled out in the Constitution are legislative in character.

But if the vice president is a legislative official, then the exercise of executive power by the vice president raises important constitutional questions related to the separation of powers....

----------------------------------------------------

Extensive vice presidential involvement in the executive branch — the role enjoyed by Dick Cheney and Al Gore — is not only unconstitutional, but also a bad idea.

This is as much as I will link to this passive-aggressive cyber-lout, but if you're a blogospheric crawler like me, you're pretty clear on the following...

You can find almost nowhere where on this clown's blog where he's as much as a whispered “boo” about Dick Cheney's abuses of power being extra-constitutional. In fact, He snickered, “heh-indeeded”, and lame-snarked his way through every one of Dickie-boy's excesses.

Why? Because Vice-President Cheney's enemy was also his enemy—liberals, progressives and Democrats—and Reynolds got his spiteful jollies over how the flint-hearted bastard pushed our every button. Now, as it is becoming apparent that “his” team may well come up empty, he's gone all furrow-browed and concern troll-y on us and “gasp!” suddenly fears for the democracy.

And note his wanna-be crafty attempt to conflate Gore and Cheney in his little whining grafs. If he was going to be forced even mildly rebuke the excesses of Halliburton's man at 1600 Penn, he made damn sure he was going to do it while taking down the last Veep, who was nowhere near as powerful, and in fact was shut out of much of then President Clinton's decision-making (due to those strong egos clashing, mostly), and relegated to much of the drudgery that the position draws its mockery for.

Was Albert Gore Jr. a secretive paranoid who sought to illegally hide everything he did / had a hand in while in office, and failing that, shredded just about important paper with his name in it—and that which was not destroyed was locked away in mammoth, custom-built safes like they were spent nuclear fuel rods?

No. Those things didn't happen to Al Gore. But there actually were a couple of extra-constitutional things that Al Gore was at the nexus of, that Reynolds is very much on record of having a huge problem with...

Those things being Gore's winning of both the Oscar™and the Nobel Prize.

And being the duplicitous, fork-tongued shill that he is, his game now is to “tsk-tsk” at this newly dudgeoned vice-presidential “overstepping” and change every rule he's looked the other way on for the last eight years. It is now time for 'restraint!' to be championed as “The Barely Competent Snow-billy” appears to not be in line for the job. And if it means now lengthening the playing field, raising the goalposts forty feet, making a touchdown count for merely three points and extra points kicked while blindfolded, “so be it!” The republic is at risk...um, now that is.

Watching Reynolds do this routine is like watching a typically badly written and worse-acted “amnesia” story arc on an old soap opera. We, the viewers know the character well—for years—know the character's deeds pre-blow to the head, and can see the reversed, post noggin-knock ones. But you're never fooled, really. You know it's the same damn person, and as soon as the “sweeps month” is over, they'll go right back to their familiar old ways and schemes. Best of all though, are the melodramatic plots where said character is obviously faking the amnesia for sympathy, or... to perhaps further a bigger scam.

There will be more of this sort of revisionist folderol from the whiny-ass titty babies on the right should Wednesday, the day after, turn out to be the red, black and green-flagged, unwaking nightmare they so dread. It will now be the time for cautiousness and thoughtfulness for them—meaning that the big-footing their side engaged in for much of the last eight years will be pooh-poohed by them as a kind of unfortunate, but distant eons-past annoyance. Now the brake must be ridden hard and bold, and majority maneuvers must be brought to heel. Reynolds is something of a master at mealy-mouthed “thoughtfulness”. He plays at moderation and impartiality with his off-blog persona, working the concerned geek role like a slave-driver at harvest time. This is the faux-vanilla Reynolds folks see on CNN's “Reliable Sources” and the Times' Op-Ed page. But while milking that for what little integrity he may appear to possess, it is his every-day gig under the maroon flag JPEG where he is truly himself, bleating and squawking GOP approved talkling points in that “Oh, I dunno...I just heard about this and I'm so surprised I find myself believing it. Imagine that!” tone. Worse yet though, is his real stock and trade—his shady-assed linking to and barely-masked promotion of the most batshitteous people and stories on the right while playing the role of above-it-all “aggregator”.

When his side is in the crapper over something—“big time”—he gives himself away with those psyche-exposing posts that dare go beyond a few words. The ones where his spitefulness and pettiness erupt like a just-popped boil. It was only last week when the desperate fool hopped aboard Drudge's “Chifferobe-gate” failboat and drowned twenty feet from shore in Hate Harbor with this 'premature no-factual-ation':

MCCAIN VOLUNTEER ATTACKED AND MUTILATED IN PITTSBURGH:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said. . . .

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

(Ed. Note from LM— HERE IS REYNOLDS PISSY PITHY CODA:) This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy may have yelled at a Palin rally once.

Yes...he was waving the bloody-“B”-stained towel around as:

A.), A talking point to get his digs in at a media that displeases him when it doesn't run with the message of the day he and his masters wants them to (and let's be real...to hate on a media his un-telegenic, vanilla ass can't ever quite supercede in spite of the millions sunk into “Pajamas Media”)...

...B.), A completely false (in every way we would discover) comparative between the behavior of the respective camps supporters...

...And C.), a lame dodge for the video-documented, creeptastic racism displayed at McCain / Palin campaign rallies. And note the bitchy tone he huffs along with in his “Taggies, no tag-backs! Nyah-nyah!” capper to the “game-changer” he snagged in his teeth after it was squeezed out by his pal Drudge.

That's the “thoughtful”, sober-thinking, third-tier law professor / concern-troll who wrote that Op-Ed in his true form—that of a bitter wingnut with a persecution complex—and nary an intellectually honest bone in his body.